We empirically revisit the crowding-in effect of government spending on private consumption based on rolling windows of U.S. data. Results show that in earlier samples government spending is increasingly crowding in private consumption; however, this relation is reverted in the latest periods. We propose a model embedding non-separable public and private consumption in the utility function and rule-of-thumb consumers to assess the sources of non-monotonic changes in the transmission of the shock. The iterative full information estimation of the model reveals that changes in the co-movement between private and public spending is primarily driven by the fluctuations in the elasticity of substitution between private and public consumption, the share of financially constrained consumers, and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution.

We propose an integrated method based on a two-sector small open economy dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium model to estimate non-tariff barriers and quantify the impact of services liberalization. The major component of trade barriers is explicitly modeled through the introduction of entry-sunk costs. Hence, liberalization is treated assuming a government's policy decision aimed at reducing those costs. Then, we estimate the model using Bayesian techniques for Tunisia and the Euro Area. The paper presents a precise quantitative evaluation of services trade barriers as the difference between entry-sunk costs in Tunisia versus the Euro Area. We find significant welfare benefits in addition to aggregate and sectoral growth gains the Tunisian economy could attain following services liberalization. Surprisingly, the goods sector is the one that benefits the most from services liberalization in the short- and long-term horizons.

Bank interest rate spreads in Solomon Islands are high by regional standards. This paper examines the determinants of bank interest rates including bank specific, banking sector, macroeconomic, and legal indicators. The results show that the scale of operation, overhead costs, concentration index, and some macroeconomic variables (i.e., monetary policy rates and real growth) significantly influence interest rate margins. The paper particularly focus on the influence of the banking sector structure and finds strong evidence of bank collusion.

We study empirically the reaction of fiscal policy to changes in the permanent and transitory components of GDP in a panel of countries. We find evidence that government spending tends to be counter-cyclical conditional on temporary shocks and pro-cyclical conditional on permanent shocks. We also find no evidence that developing countries are systematically different from developed ones in terms of fiscal policy. We present a theory featuring a fiscal reaction function to the output gap and a measure of debt sustainability. The fiscal impulse response to a permanent (temporary) shock to GDP is positive (negative) as the effect on debt sustainability (current output gap) dominates. The results are mostly sensitive to the relative weight of debt sustainability in the fiscal reaction function as well as to the extent of real rigidities in the economy.

We analyze the effects of macroprudential policies through the lens of an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model tailored to developing markets. In particular, we explicitly introduce informality in the labor and goods markets within a small open economy embedding financial frictions, nominal and real rigidities, labor search and matching, and an explicit banking sector. We use the estimated version of the model to run welfare analysis under optimized monetary and macroprudential rules. Results show that although informality reduces the efficiency of macroprudential policies following a convex fashion, combining the latter with an inflation targeting objective could be beneficial.

This paper investigates optimized monetary policy rules in the presence of government intervention to stabilize prices of certain categories of goods and services. The paper estimates a small-scale, structural equilibrium model with a sticky-price sector and a subsidized price sector for a large number of countries using Bayesian methods. The main result of this paper is that strict headline inflation targeting could be outperformed by sectoral inflation targeting, output gap stabilization, or a combination of these. In addition, several country cases exhibit lower performance of both headline and core inflation stabilization, the two most common policies in modern central banks' practices. For practical monetary policy design, we numerically identify country specific thresholds for the degree of government intervention in price setting under which core inflation targeting turns out to be the optimal choice in the context of implementable Taylor rules.

The paper asks how state of the art DSGE models that account for the conditional response of hours following a positive neutral technology shock compare in a marginal likelihood race. To that end we construct and estimate several competing small-scale DSGE models that extend the standard real business cycle model. In particular, we identify from the literature six different hypotheses that generate the empirically observed decline in worked hours after a positive technology shock. These models alternatively exhibit (i) sticky prices; (ii) firm entry and exit with time to build; (iii) habit in consumption and costly adjustment of investment; (iv) persistence in the permanent technology shocks; (v) labor market friction with procyclical hiring costs; and (vi) Leontief production function with labor-saving technology shocks. In terms of model posterior probabilities, impulse responses, and autocorrelations, the model favored is the one that exhibits habit formation in consumption and investment adjustment costs. A robustness test shows that the sticky price model becomes as competitive as the habit formation and costly adjustment of investment model when sticky wages are included.

This paper documents the determinants of real oil price in the global market based on SVAR model embedding transitory and permanent shocks on oil demand and supply as well as speculative disturbances. We find evidence of significant differences in the propagation mechanisms of transitory versus permanent shocks, pointing to the importance of disentangling their distinct effects. Permanent supply disruptions turn out to be a bigger factor in historical oil price movements during the most recent decades, while speculative shocks became less influential.

Prevailing research suggests that climate change disproportionately burdens emerging markets and developing economies with greater output losses compared to advanced economies, positing that colder regions are less impacted than their warmer counterparts. This study revisits the empirical relationship between temperature fluctuations and real growth, with a novel focus on differentiating between transitory versus permanent temperature shifts, aligning naturally with the definitions of weather and climate change, respectively. Our findings reveal that richer and colder economies exhibit better adaptation only in response to weather shocks, whereas the pattern reverses for climate change disturbances, challenging the conclusions of previous studies.